Noun

1 a very light colorless element that is one of
the six inert gasses; the most difficult gas to liquefy; occurs in
economically extractable amounts in certain natural gases (as those
found in Texas and Kansas) [syn: helium, atomic
number 2]

Conjunction

Pinyin syllable

he

A transliteration of any of a number of Chinese characters
properly represented as having one of four tones, hē, hé, hě, or hè.

Usage notes

English transcriptions of Chinese speech often
fail to distinguish between the critical tonal differences employed
in the Chinese language, using words such as this one without the
appropriate indication of tone.

Pronunciation

Pronoun

Descendants

Spanish

Verb

See also

Usage

People

He can be used as a substitution of a male's
name.

Animals

Grammatically, it is most often incorrect to use
the pronouns "he" or "she" when referring to animals, with the
neuter "it" being more correct. However, they are both often used
colloquially to refer to animals of the appropriate gender.

Generic

Other

The pronoun He, with a universally capitalized H is
often used to refer to God.

Gender

The gender system in Modern English is generally
natural, semantic and logical, however it is most similar to
languages whose gender systems primarily distinguish between the
animate and inanimate, and between the personal and impersonal. In
the table RP stands for relative pronoun and PP for personal
pronoun.

Etymology

Indo-European

Germanic

Old English

Speakers of Old English
(OE) considered each noun to have a grammatical
gender — masculine, feminine or neuter. Pronouns were generally
(but not always) selected to have the same grammatical gender as
the noun they referred to. For example, dæg (, day) was masculine,
so a masculine pronoun was used when referring to a day or days.
The personal pronoun for a singular masculine subject was written
he, just like Present-Day English (PrDE). However, OE he was
probably pronounced like PrDE hay (). The vowel in hay is normally
longer in duration than in the exlamation Hey! (). Because the
vowel sound of OE he was long in duration, scholars (and OE
dictionaries) now write it as hē.

Middle English

There was one change to the inflection of
the masculine pronoun in Middle
English. The OE dative form
him replaced the OE accusative
hine (). This meant that, in Middle English, there was no
distinction between masculine and impersonal, except in the subject
case of the third-person singular, until it from hit replaced him
in the object case of the impersonal. So, "there was rather an
extended period of time in the history of the English language when
the choice of a supposedly masculine personal pronoun (him) said
nothing about the gender or sex of the referent."